Cassigneul, Jean-Pierre, La Curieuse, 1991

In 1991, author Françoise Sagan published Toquades, a collection of eight texts exploring a character’s love affairs, each with a portrait of a mistress. Illustrator Jean-Pierre Cassigneul accompanies these stories with numbered and signed full-page lithographs. 230 copies of the book were printed on Arches vellum, with the text published by Imprimerie Nationale. Of the 230 copies, 20 are numbered and accompanied by two rejected plates, signed by the artist, while 180 copies are numbered from 21 to 200, and a further 30, hors commerce, up to XXX.

In each text, Sagan highlights a different mistress, and Cassigneul’s illustration doesn’t just depict these women: it embodies the iconography of a particular character trait, a flaw, that both seduced the character and led to the breakup. Through this collaboration between writer and artist, each lithograph becomes a visual vision of the flaw that shapes the dynamics of love, illustrating the paradox between attraction and disillusionment.